NYFF: A Swarm of Surrealism
Friday, September 26, 2014 at 2:20PM Our coverage of the 2014 New York Film Festival, which opens today, continues - here's Jason with an askance look at some of the unsung heroes of The Wonders and their cinematic precedents...
Earlier this week Glenn wrote up a review of Alice Rohrwacher's really very fine film The Wonders, which I also heartily endorse. I was sitting next to him at the press screening and besides being communally delighted (that sounds dirty but I mean it in the most innocent way possible) by the movie together we squirmed, writhed, and let out little moans of discomfort (alright it sounds dirty again, just bear with me here) when the screen repeatedly filled with bees - so many bees! If I'd given it any thought beforehand I might have skipped the film because despite not having an allergy I am a total melissophobic and watching them crawl on human skin is akin to water torture - you might know me as a horror movie fan, a badge I wear with pride, but nothing will make me cover my eyes and climb backwards in my seat quicker than a plain ol' minding-his-own-business honey-bee. Know the real enemy.
That said there's a surrealistic beauty to ways the bees are shot in The Wonders (there's a reason that the poster uses the imagery), and also another animal in the film (which I won't name since it contributes a nice jolt of WTF), and all this got me thinking about the use of animals as surrealist props. It's got a long, sometimes sordid (think of Jodorowsky blowing up all those poor frogs in The Holy Mountain or the tortoise being slaughtered in Cannibal Holocaust) history - I'm sure there have been plenty of dissertations written on it but what I think it comes down to is the unfathomable interior life of The Beast - we cannot know what is going on behind the eyes of these creatures, and so they will always remain strange, the Other. They're a nice short-cut to Uncanny Land, in other words.
And now, because I agree with Nathaniel that lists are super fun, here are the 5 fun instances of animals being used to inject a little surrealism into a film.
The Giraffe in The Great Beauty
The Escaped Zoo Animals in Twelve Monkeys
The Cat Attack in Let the Right One In
Chaos Reigns: The Fox in Antichrist
The Elephant Funeral in Sante Sangre
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Name some of your favorites in the comments!
Reader Comments (11)
Catzilla from Mousehunt.
The white peacock in Gloria should be #6 just for its out-of-nowhereness.
I missed the part about the surrealism. There is a snake in The Thin Red Line that is both surreal and real. It just suddenly appears on screen, this angry, probably poisonous snake during a battle and jolts you out of the fear of bullets into a fear of nature..........then it's back to bullets.
Oh lord, that cat attack in Let the Right One In should have been axed. Talk about a tension killer.
for me it will always be that rain of frogs in MAGNOLIA... but do the various animals in UNCLE BOONMEE count or are they ineligible due to the fact that the film is already surreal without them?
The goats on the table in La Quattro Volte, and in the very same sense "The cow on the roof of the house" in O Brother Where Art Thou
Nat I think it's fine to include films that are overwhelmingly surreal that use animals to get part of the way there - bringing up Jodorowsky at all is diving of the deep end of that ;)
I thought of tons of horror movies; one thing that's always worked on me is close-ups of horse eyes - I find their wild shimmering blackness utterly horrifying (I have no idea why, just one of those things) and I think it's The Ring maybe, one of the cursed videotapes, that exploits that to great effect. And thinking of that made me think of the single good scene in the American Ring 2 where a pack of deer attack a car; the deer, like the cats in Let the Right One In, are made of awful CG, but the strangeness of it is effective in a weird way
The most recent example I can think of is the hounds in Borgman. That whole film was so unsettling and the fact that so much of what was going on was left unexplained and open to interpretation makes the existence of those dogs even scarier because of who/what they might actually be.
The spiders in Enemy, the peacock in Amarcord, and the horses in Michael Clayton are some other examples I love.
The sheep and the bear from The Exterminating Angel.
Trier's talking fox is plot-related and not that surreal, - at least not compared to the nocturnal animal in his The Element of Crime, truly a strange, surreal film overall.
And what about the horse-ending of Andrei Rublev? I have never understood it, although I love the film.
Short film 5:15